Stranger than Fiction, Larger Than Life: the Finn Brothers song-by-song discussion thread

Today's song is "Everything To Live For" by The Rock Party, written by Tim Finn, Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Paul Hester, produced by Joe Wissert - Wikipedia , engineered by David Nicholas.

The song, in higher quality than the YouTube video, can be streamed at Neil Finn - The Kitchen Sink IV — Neil Finn

I don't know much about this song: I assume it was a charity single for some anti-drug initiative. I wish I had had the forethought to follow it up with "White Mischief", but there you go.

 

WEll, this song is a blast of stale air after Crowded House. It sounds like a Tim Finn Big Canoe reject with some not particularly well-integrated bridges written by Neil Finn. I assume, since they are listed as co-writers, that Nick Seymour and Paul Hester play on this, but maybe they just played on the demo, and Wissert used studio people. Though that discordant John Lennon-like lead guitar can only be Neil.

AT any rate, it's a far cry from Mitchell Froom's organic, rather retro production of Crowded House.

The song does have an infectious joyousness going for it and an extremely catchy chorus, the lyrics . But that's about all I can say for it. It's a curious oddity, and an interesting rarity: I'm glad it's accessible on Youtube and neilfinn.com. But I'm afraid I'm not going to rate it too highly, as it begins to grate after the first two minutes. It's mainly just kind of cute.
2.4/5

 

Gawd, it’s horrible. 1/5.

 

It does have some good bits, but it also has some bad bits.

2.5/5

 

Joe Wissert was a hotshot producer in 1967, working with two bands I really liked, the Turtles and the Lovin' Spoonful. He produced a string of hits for the Turtles back in 1967. In the 70s, he produced some extremely successful records, but not for bands/artists I had any interest in.

But this record is crap. I think there might be a decent song underneath it all, but not a great one, it's hard to find much of anything worthwhile underneath all of the garbage.

The musician credits are on discogs: The Rock Party - Everything To Live For, it is a Crowded House track with Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner, Reg Mombassa on second guitar, and lots of guest vocalists, but the production style is all wrong. Imagine the horror if the first Crowded House record had been produced by Joe Wissert. This thread might not exist if it had.

2/5 for "Everything To Live For" being the only song credited to Neil, Tim, Nick and Paul.

 

Wow! That's amazing.

It's interesting that a number of us have various experiences of interacting with Neil and/or CH. For many bands, the opportunities to interact like this don't exist - but Neil and CH have always encouraged interaction.

 

I think I gave the album 3/5 the day before.


As for the charity song, it was good of Neil, Tim and the rest to give their time for this but sadly there is no musical quality on display here. It is dull, clumsy and repetitive. The production does again recall many of the worst things of the 80s. The best thing I can say about it is that the lyrics are not as bad or embarrassing as in some other charity songs.

Still 1/5 though.

 

Sorry, I’ll redo the count: in the interests of science.

 

I have the "Everything To Live For" 12" single and am happy to own it as a collector's item, but I have barely listened to it, perhaps three times including today as it is the song of the day. Like many of these kind of charity singles (Band Aid, USA For Africa, Artists United Against Apartheid etc) with many Famous Artists singing one line each, it is hard to judge it solely as a piece of music or as a work of art. You'd have to assume the main goal was that the single was going to sell a lot of copies so they could raise money for the Get Real anti-drug campaign in Australia. I have no idea if this song was a hit or not. If it was and they did raise a lot of money, good for the Get Real organisation. The song is quite catchy, but sounds very dated now 30 years later and frankly I doubt I will listen to it again in the next few decades.

For what it's worth, the songwriting credits lists Neil first, then Tim, Nick and Paul. There had been tracks credited to both Finns before this, but in those cases (Give It A Whirl, Mind Over Matter, Dirty Creature, Lost For Words and Firedrill) Tim's name was always listed first. I have worked in the music copyright industry for many years and it's never random which writer is listed first ("Dirty Creature" for instance lists the writers as Tim / Nigel / Neil while "Lost For Words" lists them as Nigel / Tim / Neil), so I have to assume that Neil was considered to have contributed most to this track. The back cover of the record has some liner notes which says "As it has turned out the musicians who made this record felt very differently. Their commitment, energy and enthusiasm was visible during the sessions, from Neil Finn's boundless intensity to Reg Mombassa's impeccable slide solo, everyone played their part." [None of the other musicians or singers are mentioned, other than Neil Finn and Reg Mombassa]. The liner notes also says "Special thanks must go to Neil Finn who was the first to believe." [Again, no other musician or singer on the record is thanked, though curiously Dire Straits are]

When I read the list of musicians and singers on this record, there is Crowded House (with Eddie Rayner), Tim Finn, Reg Mombassa and Martin Plaza from Mental As Anything, Geoff Stapleton, Robbie James and Mark Callaghan from GANGgajang, Paul Kelly, Deborah Conway, Spencer P. Jones, Jenny Morris, Robert Susz from Dynamic Hepnotics, Sean Kelly from The Models and solo artists Peter Blakely and John Kennedy, plus some names I'm not familiar with. Given the amount of very talented people involved, it is really disappointing that they came up with this turkey. Also, I feel that if they were truly devoted to this cause, I think a big festival featuring the listed groups and solo artists, with all profits going to the Get Real campaign would have raised a lot more money. Plus that they could then have released a live album and live video, raising even more money.

Joe Wissert, apart from all his well-known stuff with famous American artists, also around this time produced GANGgajang's debut album, which included their most well-known song "Sounds of Then", and that album sounds nothing like this Rock Party single so I don't think this song shows what he is capable of.

Small piece of Finn-related GANGgajang trivia: they have a song called "Anodyne Dream" (from their album "Oceans and Deserts" released in 2002) in which the lyrics consists entirely of titles of famous hit songs (Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Queen etc etc). Two Finn tracks are namechecked in this song, "Distant Sun" and "Fraction Too Much Friction".

As a piece of music, "Everything To Live For" gets 1,5/5 from me.

 

Our votes for "Everything to Live For"

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3-3
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5-0
Average: 1.733

 

Revised votes for Crowded House (now with Turk Thrust's vote!)

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2-0
3-1
4-3
5-4
Average: 4.0625
Average rating by song: 4.0340

 

Today's song is "Whispers and Moans [Home Demo]", written by Neil Finn.

Spotify: Whispers And Moans - Home Demo

Although the title is the same, this is different from the Woodface song. Although the title line appears in the latter song as a backing vocal.

According to the Temple of Low Men deluxe booklet, this was "recorded by Neil Finn on cassette circa 1986."

 

This song is quite startling in its emotional rawness. When I think of Neil Finn's songwriting, I normally think of craftmanship above all; the way he (and whoever he's collaborating with) develops songs and pieces of music into a cohesive whole with a shape and structure.

While this song does have structure (a recognizable verse and chorus) the craft of it doesn't seem particularly labored over: in fact, it sounds almost ripped from Neil's soul.And perhaps the lo-fi nature of the recording helps the song a little: the basic nature of the recording technology matches the rawness of the song.
The lyric which begins with Neil in his room locking the door and "wishing that inspiration would come and take" him, looking out the window at the wind in the trees and going back in his mind to what appears to be a sexual encounter. There's a painful yearning for sexual connection: not a lustful song, but a sad song about the lack of love, physical and otherwise.

And I can well imagine that Neil wrote this while stuck in LA far from his family or perhaps on the road. It doesn't have to be that way: it could be a man yearning for connection after a painful argument, too.

It's interesting that 95 percent of this song was basically discarded. While any number of songs he released afterwards are better crafted, the song is not bad. I feel like this is as close to a glimpse of the songwriter in the very moment of creation as we are going to get.

3.4/5

 

I find the verse to be rather boring - it would possibly have been lifted by a good arrangement. But this really doesn't go anywhere and the only thing it shares with its finished counterpart is the title, I'm glad to have it because I'll take every idea Neil ever had. But it's not something I'd have listened to twice had he not been the one who recorded it. 2/5.

 

One of the interesting things for me about this thread is listening to songs like this that I had previously not gotten around to checking out.

I was expecting this to simply be an early version of the Woodface song so it was a surprise to hear that it is something else entirely. It's also not bad at all and had the potential to be much better than some of the weaker tracks on the debut album.

3/5.

 

This Whispers and Moans takes a little more attention, because its so close and intimate. The melody is lovely, as expected, but the words for me are vague and hard to follow. Had this been brought forward and recorded as a completed track on Temple of Low Men as is, it probably would have been one of the weaker songs on the record (and one of the stronger songs on anyone else's record). Still, I like hearing every tidbit that comes out of Neil's imagination and I'm glad to have it.

3/5, mostly for the melody.

 

At first, the "Whispers and Moans" home demo felt like an anonymous song with Neil just strumming his acoustic guitar without any clear idea for the song, but there's something about this demo that fascinates me. As a song, it is obviously unfinished but if I had been Mitchell Froom in 1987/88, I think I would have encouraged Neil to work on it a bit more and also see how it would sound with Nick and Paul adding their ideas and parts. They weren't just session musicians playing what they were told, I think they would have added their unique flavours to the song and would have had ideas for the arrangement as well.

It's a real treat to hear both the home demos and the studio demos on the deluxe editions and get that insight into Neil's and Crowded House's creative process. We fans are truly lucky that someone as devoted and knowledgable as Jaffaman was involved in these deluxe editions!

This home demo is underdeveloped as it is, but it has/had potential to become something better, so I give it 3/5.

 

This song was a bit of a surprise to me. I must have heard it in the past but I didn't add it to a Spotify playlist of CH songs I was less familiar with, presumably because I thought it was a home demo of the WF song.

It is, as we would expect, a nice song. I'm having a bit of difficulty imagining how it would be fully produced had it been released. (I'm not suggesting this is a reason why it would be left on the shelf as my inability to imagine it as a finished song doesn't mean that I think that others would have the same difficulty.)

It's hard to rate these unfinished demos as I'm not sure how I should be rating them - compared against finished songs or as a demo.

Many of Neil's demos have more production, overdubs etc., than this one does. So, it seems that it never progressed very far.

I'm also having a bit of trouble picking up all the lyrics, and I couldn't find a transcription online. Attempts to google such have failed.

Hence, I'm not sure I can give this song a fair evaluation. It sounds like a reasonable, but not exceptional, song. Neil sings it well, for a demo. Like others, it's not something that I would come back to in its present form.

2.9/5

 

These deluxe editions are an absolute model of how deluxe reissues should be done. Truly about the best there are, maybe equaled only by that Purple Rain deluxe set a few years back.

In this era when music hardly sells at all we are so lucky to have such excellent reissues.

 

I actually don't mind "Everything To Live For". It's not something I'd go out of my way to play, but I find it listenable. I have both mixes from the 12" single, although I think the "Unreal Mix" is just a longer version of the "Real Mix". I certainly haven't compared them A to B to see where the differences are. The other track on the 12" single is called "Get Real" and is credited to the "Get Real Rappers". I don't think there's any Finn involvement on that track, at least that I hear.

Anyway, I'll give "Everything To Live For" a 2.8/5 - both mixes.

 

The "Whispers and Moans" home demo certainly took me by surprise when it emerged as a bonus track on the deluxe edition reissue of Temple of Low Men in 2016. I wasn't prepared for it being an almost entirely different song to the amazing cut that I was familiar with from Woodface. I don't like this song as much as I do the later song of the same title, and wouldn't even had it been completed to a similar state. However, it's certainly not bad and I can definitely hear a fair amount of promise in it.

3.0/5

 

Our votes for "Whispers and Moans"[Home Demo]:

1-0
2-1
3-6
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5-0
Average: 2.9

 

Today's song is "Think I'm Gonna Change", another home demo by Neil Finn, recorded in 1987.


Think I’m Gonna Change - Home Demo

The song was released on the 2016 bonus disc of "Temple of Low Men". The chorus was later included as a backing vocal hook in "Never Be the Same".

 

This is another promising song, though it's just a snippet. Obviously Froom and Finn rejected 65% of the song, and relegated the chorus to a mere backing vocal. It's pretty inspired how they was able to isolate the best, most arresting elements of a song and figure out where to put them in another song.

After the initial "Think I'm Gonna Change" lines, Neil sounds so much like John Lennon it's weird. The singing in that bit is lovely, another example of Neil singing well on home demos due to lack of pressure and stress.

I'm not really sure what the lyrics are on about, though the title lines make me think there is some similar theme to "Never Be the Same" going on and he was struggling to get that rather complex emotion across by juxtoposing the harsh nasal "think I'm gonna change" with the more flowing love song bit and trying to illustrate these two different urges, but who knows, really?.

It's just a snippet of a song, included mainly because I think enough of it is unique enough to look at as a song in and of itself.

2.6

 

Nah, 2.4.